“Good news,” said the journalist cheerfully, coming to greet his friend, and noting with a sudden swift pleasure that a faint blush came to her cheeks and a new light to her eyes as she welcomed him. “Good news! As I was coming away the newspapers were out with the extra. The city council held a special meeting during the afternoon. They have abolished the segregated district. The city has formally adopted the policy of suppressing instead of circumscribing vice.”
“That is the beginning of the end,” said Miss Randall. “If our campaign has won that we have won all I hoped for.”
“Yet many people believe that we failed.”
“Even if we had failed we should have made progress. Every movement of this kind leaves its mark on the public conscience. It makes work easier for other crusaders.”
“Yes,” responded Ambrose, “because it brings out the facts. Facts are lasting. They cannot die.”
“Progress comes through inculcation of these facts, by means of education. Schools and churches—and parents—must concentrate on the moral improvement of the rising generation, or we wrestle ineffectively.”
“The kind of vice you have been specially fighting will be extinct within the next ten years,” said Ambrose. “I don’t mean that we shall have suppressed vice. That is a task for centuries. But our people in the United States will not stand for this trade in girls.”
“I’d like to preach to men who have daughters to protect to take their wives and go out and see some of the shady places of the city for themselves. It would make any mother far more careful in future about the companions of their daughters.”
“Yes, to whisper about ‘wild oats’ and to see a young man who wants to marry one’s daughter in a dive are two very different things.”
“We are going to have vice,” said Miss Randall, “as long as economic conditions set the stage for it. A young girl housed in a poor tenement, ill-lighted, poorly heated, badly ventilated, fed and clothed insufficiently—see to it that she hears foul language, and witnesses drunkenness and quarrelling—then you have the condition that produces the delinquent city girl.”